From Hebrew Scrolls to Greek Codices: How the Bible Reached Us
The Bible did not arrive in history as a single bound volume. Its books were...
May 2024
Dating the Gospels: What the Evidence Suggests
The four Gospels are formally anonymous works whose dates must be reconstructed from internal clues...
The Masoretic Text: How Jewish Scribes Preserved the Hebrew Bible
Between roughly AD 500 and 1000, families of Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes developed...
How the New Testament Canon Was Recognized
No church council invented the New Testament. The twenty-seven books were read, copied, and used...
Why Old Testaments Differ: The Deuterocanon Question
Open a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible side by side and the Old Testaments...
Inscriptions and Ostraca: Everyday Writing from Ancient Israel
Long before the Bible was bound in leather, Hebrew was scratched onto potsherds, carved into...
The Tel Dan Stele and the House of David
In 1993, excavators at Tel Dan in northern Israel unearthed fragments of a ninth-century BC...
Hesed: The Hebrew Word English Can’t Quite Capture
Translators render the Hebrew word hesed as “lovingkindness,” “steadfast love,” “mercy,” or “covenant loyalty” —...
Codex Sinaiticus: The Oldest Complete New Testament
Produced around AD 350 and associated with St. Catherine’s Monastery beneath Mount Sinai, Codex Sinaiticus...
The Divine Name: How YHWH Was Written and Read
The personal name of God appears more than 6,800 times in the Hebrew Bible, written...